The update hath hitteth

After a bit of work, even more debugging and a lot of testing we have uploaded the new code. Even though the appearance has not changed much, the underlying technology is now much more efficient and reliable and will allow us to add more features in the long run.

The key: more data storage

The key change was the internal storage of all your regularly updated feeds. This is now done properly and allows much more reliable performance than our old code.

But it also helps with our features. For example, the statistics have always depended on the current rss-file from each blog. Almost all the statistics were simply wrong because the feeds are too short to store the information we needed for, say, the monthly count. Now that the feeds are stored in our database we can give more accurate counts.

Other cosmetic changes

The few cosmetic changes happened, e.g., on the “By Date” views that got a small menu. Most prominent are the changes to PlanetTAG. The tag cloud now has more entries and the dominant terms (such as “mathematics”) have been filtered out. We hope it will be more useful that way even though tagging is very inconsistent across the mathematical blogosphere.

Database update coming up

With these changes the code is finally efficient enough again to take on a whopping 100+ new database entries — getting us well on our way to 500 entries!

Would you have made that comment if you didn’t know I’m not a native speaker? ;)

It was supposed to be an ironic exaggeration regarding the importance and delay of the update, using a grammatical mistake to increase the desired effect. But you’re absolutely right — I should never, ever try irony on the intertubes… Good people become trolls for far less ;)